Leaving F-Droid
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20231117190207/https://gitlab.co...
Edit: since multiple trolls are in the thread, this isn't just one person. Multiple people simultaneously resigned from the community council. Edit: the entire community council. Three people - the fourth was the F-droid board's representative.
More about the community council: https://forum.f-droid.org/t/call-for-volunteers-f-droid-comm...
It sounds like F-droid established a governing board this year and one of their first actions was to address complaints from contributors about how Hans was running things. The board established the community council, Hans kept doing whatever he wanted, and the board didn't act, so much of the community council resigned?
Edit: I think the entire community council quit, given the fourth member is their board representative?
Further to making statements in their own community private, it seems even this HN post has been flagged by someone for some reason...
I don't know what that means. HN moderation is such a black box.
If not and this flagging was approved by mods for legitimate reasons please ignore this comment.
Also note that the accusation is clear: Hans doesn't respect anything proposed by the ComCo, making it useless despite their clear mandate, personally undercutting the ComCo members with vague accusations.
And someone has tried the same here
that doesn't seem to be happening here.
You're involved in this?
i am an f-droid user, and i am certainly concerned if there are issues in the community. but this post does not help to enlighten matters and i feel it will only attract vocal outsiders who have nothing substantial to contribute.
this issue needs to be handled internally by the active f-droid contributors, and if they are not issuing public statements with details on what is actually going on then the rest of us should stand back.
i doubt any message here is going to be helpful in resolving issues or even just learning more.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231117190207/https://gitlab.co...
Issue 448 is said to be relevant as well, and similarly hidden, but isn't available on archive.
The fact that a remaining project member seems to be actively hiding otherwise public discussion which would keep us more informed, seems to itself be noteworthy ("Because I felt like it" was the reason given). Indeed, that action seems to be an example of the unilateral and arbitrary exercise of power with which the former contributors are raising concerns.
One wonders if a precedent can be set for getting an HN story of potential wrongdoing buried by hiding or destroying reports or evidence of it.
I don't know what more do you want ? As you said we won't solve anything but with such important issues I want to be informed and not hidden and flagged.
Especially since the current plan for the mentionned Hans is to continue business as usual with no change ...
What a truly odd sentiment from someone with an apparent interest in open-source community-led projects.
i find that dragging disputes into the public is often used for one side to draw support in their favor. i don't think that this is happening here, as the statements made are to vague. but in general i am not a fan of making such things public as it prevents people who are involved from opening up and sharing their concerns in the internal discussion for fear of having them made public too.
we need to give people in dispute the space to resolve their issues without forcing them to face the court of public opinion.
Of course not, nor did I imply such an extreme.
> we need to give people in dispute the space to resolve their issues without forcing them to face the court of public opinion.
This only functions with balanced moderating forces within an internal dispute - where there is a clear power imbalance (e.g. a technical lead who holds exclusive keys to things), resolution of a dispute in private will typically lean heavily in favour of those holding defacto power, leaving "the court of public opinion" a sole remaining last resort.
just look at this case. from our perspective here, there are only two options: hans continues as before, or hans is entirely removed from the project. i don't see any way to come to a solution where both sides continue to be able to work together.
such a solution is only possible before the naming and shaming in public begins.
an amicable solution requires that the parties involved can speak without fear of retribution. dragging this into the public makes that pretty much impossible.
if the parties can not solve the problem on their own, they can find mediators (from their community or from outside) to help. if that is not enough the inner community, the active contributors can get involved, and only if that fails too, it may be right to make the issue public. but, at that point the choices usually have already been made (as we can see here again, with some of the people involved resigning) and our public opinion and discussion here can do nothing that would improve the situation.
Mediation is typically only possible where either both parties are willing (clearly not the case here) or where the mediator has some leverage with any unwilling parties (seemingly not to be found here either, at least sofar).
> the power issue can not be solved by the court of public opinion
Honestly you may well be right but this is precisely why I cited it as an unfortunate last resort. It's pretty clear here that even the very formation of the council was in itself an attempt at internal mediation after years of problems.
As unlikely as it is that going public will lead to a solution whereby the council members rejoin the existing project and have a long and fruitful collaborative relationship with Hans into the future, it does at least open the door for a larger number of potentially beneficial options.
Even the "nuclear" option (fork and rival), while wasteful in terms of human effort, has some potential to lead to a project that much better serves the open source community. Having such discussions in an open forum can help people better weigh up the pros & cons of joining vs forking indispensable community projects such as this.
I think understanding this statement is key. Blocking what protections? From what abuse? How and when were they blocked? Without that context, it's hard to say this text has any more clarity than the text accuses Hans' responses of having.
Default Gitlab setup doesn't have roles which would be suitable for community moderators. But it seems like Gitlab Ultimate has support for custom roles which could have solved that issue. No idea if F-Droid is in the Gitlab Open-Source program which gives open source projects access to premium features.
If things stand like this though in all likelihood people should switch to a clone project maintained by the people who left (and there will be a huge mess)
"According to Hans, "many people" have expressed "concerns" about me -- though for some reason not during the period expressly meant for people to voice those, apparently only to him in private, mysteriously never mentioned before now, and that cannot be named for some reason.
Concerns that are simultaneously both too unimportant to address so I can defend myself (and apparently not an issue for me joining ComCo), yet more than enough for Hans to unilaterally block me from getting Maintainer status on gitlab, even though the board -- including Hans -- voted to grant me that, which Hans then blocked for weeks using a myriad of counterfactuals as justification."
> Sadly, this is not a single incident -- if it was I would still believe things could be fixed -- but a pattern of behaviour that has continued for years. I've tried to be patient, hoping we could still resolve things, give everyone the benefit of the doubt as I constantly have. But clearly, this is not possible as long as Hans refuses any and all accountability for his actions, and any attempts at mediation to resolve the interpersonal friction and conflicts. > > Hans' actions have repeatedly hurt me (and others)
This post is light on details. If there were many incidents, some details would be available.
Who is the intended audience? How are they meant to evaluate the letter?
I see OP now mentions this:
> Edit 3: please note that this statement was originally addressed to the F-Droid team, not a general audience.
This is worse character assassination than any "woke" bullshit. But thanks for outing yourself as someone completey unserious.
I'm an avid F-Droid user so I do have a vested interest in the project remaining active and on-target. As it stands I do not know whether Hans' actions helped to keep the project healthy or had the opposite effect. Does anyone here know more?
Interestingly enough they allow 4Chan apps which has all of those things. It is almost as though they are opposed to Gab specifically not against those things and were just coming up with an excuse and hoped nobody saw their double standards.
That's the impression given by posts linked here. The initiative to begin trying to transform it into a community-run project seems to have kicked off roughly 12 months or so ago[0] - and by all accounts seems to have been met with significant resistance from the bdfl that preceded it.
[0] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/commit/031eeb78c8e35960a9a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciaran_Gultnieks
and Ciaran, while largely silent, still "holds the master keys" (figuratively and somewhat literally).
As an F-Droid member myself, albeit a completely tangential and pointless one, the only things I know about why Hans is _de facto_ leader and cannot be overridden even by the bodies created for overseeing the entire project are a couple of factors mentioned right here: that he is the only one with Owner access on GitLab, and that he is Technical Lead, "initially", in the board:
In these kind of situations, "de facto" is usually the same as "actual" for all practical purposes.
sounds a bit extreme on the privacy front, but not entirely unusual. i see no relation to how the project is run though. on the contrary, i expect community run projects even more likely to reject logging because it only takes a few vocal people to demand that. meaning the more people have a voice, the more likely demands for privacy come up. see debian and their popularity counter for example when they could just log all the downloads instead.
I'd expect privacy-inclined people to care vastly more about detecting and tracing indicators of compromise or similar over avoiding access logging on the open internet.
Edit: Use actual English.
Is the confusion a result of disagreement, or of my explaining my perspective poorly?
of course the upside of community input is that you also have more moderate voices and technically knowledgeable ones that can explain the risks and help reduce peoples worries.
unity and openai as the most high profile, but also in niche places like yahtzee crowshaw / escapist mag, and now even fdroid
maybe a covid aftershock, have there been any others?
Openai is ego based
My congratulations to Hans; as it turns out, he has done the F-Droid project yet another excellent service.
From the outside it looks like Hans is not following rules and procedures. This is never good for an active community.